To Some Dancers, ‘Black Swan’ Is a Cautionary Tale

From left, the dancers Carmella Imrie, Danielle Shupe and Mitchell Kilby at “Black Swan.”Credit
Deidre Schoo for The New York Times

CARMELLA IMRIE spent six grueling hours last Wednesday mastering steps like the brisé and jeté battu for Keith Michael’s ballet “The Alice-in-Wonderland Follies.” But instead of going home to nurse her toes afterward, she and five other dancers with the New York Theater Ballet headed out to see “Black Swan.”

After sitting through the nearly two-hour-long thriller, Ms. Imrie, 27, left the AMC Loews theater in Kips Bay wanting to shake her arms, as if her skin were crawling. It wasn’t the gore of the bloodied tutus, but the psychological subtext. “It’s the destructive personality that makes it really creepy,” she said. “You don’t ever want to have that to become you.”

“Black Swan,” which stars Natalie Portman as a ballerina whose rise to the top comes at the price of her sanity, has become something of a must-see movie for young ballerinas, not just because it is the rare Hollywood film that uses ballet as its central universe. Some dancers say that the film holds up a mirror to a darker side of ballet.

The film’s director, Darren Aronofsky, might have set out to make a thriller, but for dancers, the chills come from the unsettling topics he laid bare: the blind pursuit of perfection, the anorexia and bulimia to achieve a fat-free swanlike figure, the sexual abuse of fragile ingénues.

Those tensions are embodied in Nina Sayers, a young ballerina played by Ms. Portman. The movie begins with Nina choking down an ascetic breakfast: one grapefruit. Later, she heaves her bony shoulders to retch in the ballet company’s bathroom, and refuses even a taste of a pink-frosted celebration cake her mother has bought her.

The scene may be played with melodramatic effect, but its underlying pathos is familiar to ballet dancers. Tara Hutton, 21, a senior at Butler University in Indianapolis who is studying dance, said the specter of eating disorders haunted many of her classmates. Ballet, she said, can be a “sick and twisted art form” that puts an unrealistic value on “achieving this beautiful thin body.”

At dance camps she attended growing up, drinking quarts of Crystal Light and cup after cup of coffee to tame hunger pangs was a common practice. Dancers who starve themselves also increase the likelihood of stress fractures and other injuries, she said. In one scene from the film, Nina’s toenails crack off in her toe shoes.

“You see a dancer who is injured, and you can’t help but think twice about the fact that it could” be from eating disorders, said Ms. Hutton, who is preparing to audition for ballet companies in the Midwest this spring. “You’re working every day to achieve something that is physically impossible.”

For Nina, the impossible reflects the demands of her smothering mother, a failed dancer herself who seeks vicarious fulfillment through her daughter.

Photo

Credit
Niko Tavernise/Fox Searchlight Pictures

Cheryl Kaeser hesitated to let her daughter Emma, 15, a ballet student in Manhattan, see the movie. “I was concerned that it may show a particularly ugly side of ballet,” she said. Only recently has she decided to take Emma to the film, after serious consideration.

The film also portrays ballet as a quixotic art form that demands nothing less than total submission to the craft. Nina pirouettes until her feet are bloodied, twirling before the barre so long into the night that the theater lights go out on her, and still she wants more. Hidden under her fashionable shrugs are angry red lines that she clawed into her skin, and her fingers are bandaged to hide the raw patches of skin she casually peels. The pressures dancers face rang true for Ellen Bar, a soloist with the New York City Ballet, who attended the film’s New York premiere with 30 dancers. “The psychological torture of being an artist” felt real, she said. “The way it shows an artist being her own worst enemy.”

Jennifer Homans, a dance critic whose new history of ballet, “Apollo’s Angels,” has drawn critical applause, said that dance tends to draw people who have a kind of discipline and dedication that can flip into obsession. “They are obsessed with trying to make their bodies into something beautiful and special and otherworldly,” Ms. Homans said. “There is an enormous psychological pressure cooker there at a very young age.”

Torture for Nina came also in the form of the sexual advances of her director, Thomas Leroy, played by Vincent Cassel. He slides a wanton hand down her leotard when teaching her a turn, and shoves his tongue into her mouth when she dares to slip into his office and ask for a better part.

The dynamic has a historical precedent: the charismatic choreographer George Balanchine had a well-known weakness for his own dancers, reported in newspapers and tabloids during his time, and in books including “All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine,” by Terry Teachout.

“Is there a problem with a sort of dominant male figure and a woman under his power? Yes, that happens,” Ms. Homans said. But the problem, she added, might be exaggerated in cases of ballet companies filled with young female dancers and directed by men. “The outside world may glom on to this more in the dance world because it’s a physical art form, so the power relationships seem physical. They exist in all worlds, but they may seem to people more intense here.”

Not everyone agrees with the gloomy picture of ballet that Mr. Aronofsky paints. They argue that the eating disorders and sexual exploits are stereotypes, and that the issues dancers face are over-dramatized to the point where the film borders on farce.

Diana Byer, the artistic director of the New York Theater Ballet, said that movies that try to dramatize ballet usually miss the mark by turning actors into caricatures of tortured artists, obsessed and tormented by their craft. “Dancers are people, they have a job like everybody else,” she said during a break in rehearsal last week. “A person who doesn’t live life can’t bring anything to a ballet. You have to live life to create an art form.”

Still, she made a point of seeing the movie soon after it came out, along with nearly everyone in her 14-member company. They debated Ms. Portman’s ballet techniques during breaks in practice, critiqued some of the dance performances and gushed over a few of the costumes. The fact is, it’s not every day that Hollywood portrays their art.

Their biggest complaint about the film, she said, wasn’t the melodramatic portrayal, the inaccuracies or the ugly stereotypes. It was that there was not enough dancing in it.

A version of this article appears in print on January 9, 2011, on page ST5 of the New York edition with the headline: For Dancers, ‘Black Swan’ Is a Cautionary Tale. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe